V 0.12 Release Notes.
It's been a while!
Hello everyone! We're still here! Surprising, I know. I'll go into more detail later in this post, but the tl;dr is:
- My art team went on to bigger and better things (no hard feelings, and I'm super excited for them!). I've adapted the art style of the story cutscenes to 3D, a style that I can execute on myself.
- Google has shut down our YouTube playback feature.
- We built a custom level editor to replace YouTube playback.
Here's a list of all the major updates
- The first episode of story mode is now available! It features the first of seven planned episodes of the story mode. It also features pre-designed levels for each difficulty instead of procedural generation.
- YouTube playback functionality has been removed from the game. You can still play procedurally generated levels of local .wav and .mp3 files.
- Twitch integration has been removed from the game. It was heavily tied into the YouTube playback feature. The Unity plugin we were using has also been deprecated. We are investigating ways to bring this feature back in future versions but felt it best to remove it for now.
- Tutorials and first time user experience have been overhauled.
- Player can now remap inputs (button tooltips can also be manually changed between supported layouts).
- A general round of visual polish has been applied to the game.
A New Art Style, You Say?
Yup! Meet the new Lila!
We will be using this style for the rest of the story cutscenes, but we will not be changing any of the in-game pixel art. The cutscenes take advantage of rendering techniques we can't replicate in game.
So What Happened?
In short: A lot happened.
That's all for this update, I hope you look forward to v0.13!
Okay, in all seriousness, shortly after our last Steam update, we noticed that our limit for calls to the YouTube API was much lower than we had anticipated. I submitted a request to Google to get our limit for search queries increased. A few months later, they finally responded to my request, but instead of raising our limit, they revoked our API access. They felt that our integration of the YouTube API into our game was a breach of their terms of service. I reviewed the article they referenced and disagreed with their decision, but ultimately my attempts to appeal their decision went nowhere.
At this point we had no choice but to just remove the feature entirely. We decided to create a level editor that we could use internally to create custom levels for the story mode, and also give the players a way of engaging and expanding their music options. Unfortunately it was also around this time that our artists got full time job offers that were too good to pass up. I couldn't afford to pay them what they were worth so we parted ways on good terms. The bank account started dwindling and I had to figure out how to create the story mode that the game now hinged on without an art department or money to hire a new artist, so I did the only logical thing: I watched a ton of YouTube videos!
I'm rubbish at 2D art, but believe it or not, I went to school for 3D modeling and animation. I figured I would shake the dust off my old modeling skills and go from there. I hit the books but I haven't done any modeling in over 10 years so I had a lot to catch up on. During this time I also reworked the original story I had planned into something more manageable with a 1-person team.
Side note, for anyone looking to get into 3D modeling for free with Blender, definitely check out Blender Guru's Beginner Tutorial Series. It's a fantastic free resource and a great way to get introduced to Blender and 3D modelling in general. From there I moved on to the Stylized Character Workflow on Blender Cloud by Julien Kaspar. Blender Cloud isn't free, but it's well worth the subscription for the fantastic courses they have.
Anyways, between only being able to work on Waveform in my free time and having a lot of ground to cover, it took me well over a year to get the final render of Lila you see above. I apologize for the lack of communication during that time. I had wanted to wait until I had good news to share before sharing the bad news, but it ended up taking way longer than I was hoping to get to the good news part. But now we're here! My goal is to have all seven episodes of the story mode completed by the end of 2021.
What's Next?
I am working on the remaining six story episodes, but I will be putting an update out before episode 2. The next update will give you guys, the players, access to our level editor. Right now we're still working out some kinks and making it more user friendly, so it's strictly an internal tool we're using to construct the story levels. I wanted to get this episode 1 update out ASAP so I decided to drop the level editor feature in a future update. As I'm still working on this in my free time, I can't give a solid estimate on when that update will drop, just that it's coming Soon TM.
This update has gone on long enough, but I thought you all deserved an explanation on where I've been for almost 2 years. Thank you all so much for your support and patience with me as I work on actually releasing Waveform Wipeout and leaving Early Access!
~ Drew
